


Scarlet

by idola



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Denyuuden AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:19:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23034625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idola/pseuds/idola
Summary: An Alpha Stigma bearer's life takes a different path from a human's. Judar's is no different. His eyes are the boon and bane of his existence, both the cause of and solution to all of his problems.He knows what humans look like in his eyes. Just once, he'd like to see what he's like in their eyes.
Relationships: Judal | Judar/Ren Hakuryuu
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	Scarlet

**Author's Note:**

> i have been dying to do a denyuuden au for juhaku for a while now since i love them both very much. denyuuden is extremely niche and i expect exactly 0% of people who click this to have any idea what it is, but dont worry, you dont need to know. but if you WANT to know then i happen to [translate it here](https://idola.dreamwidth.org/) and would be very pleased to see more people get into it.
> 
> anyway, the juhakus

Everybody knew that it was an ill-omened color.

It was the color of blood, the color of magic made to kill, and the color of his eyes. So nobody was really all that surprised when his whole village erupted in flames of the same color shortly after his birth… or so he was told.

He was taken to an orphanage and given a new name. But they couldn’t give him new eyes, so nobody really wanted anything to do with him. Everybody knew that he wouldn’t get adopted the normal way, so when he was old enough to walk he was old enough to be transferred to a facility.

The Ren Children’s Facility.

Facilities collected money for being orphanages and raising kids up well, as they called it, but really they didn’t do a lot of raising, and they definitely didn’t do it well. But it was a lot more exciting than some orphanage for abandoned babies, for better or worse.

“Judar.”

Judar stepped forward. The examiner’s pink eyes looked him up and down, but since he was still only eight years old, there wasn’t a lot of movement in the motion.

The examiner checked his file and then pointed to a magic circle.

The room was organized with four rows of four magic circles each, all scarlet and all rotting holes into the musty old wood floors. It was just a facility, after all. They didn’t have any reason to fix it as long as the magic circles worked.

And they worked alright.

Judar sat in the center of a magic circle, then lay down on it, spreading his arms and legs like he’d done a billion times before already. He stared at the ceiling and waited.

The floors creaked loudly as the examiner drew closer. But Judar didn’t look at him. He just kept staring at the ceiling. At a house spider crawling idly. Maybe the magic would kill it. He was kind of looking forward to finding out.

The examiner activated the magic circle and Judar’s mind went blank.

His ears were ringing.

Judar coughed. When he glanced at his stomach, he could see why. Someone’s foot was trying to crush it. But he didn’t really feel any pain. He didn’t really hear anything, either. But he was vaguely aware that someone was talking. He couldn’t understand them, though. Not at all.

Judar didn’t move. But he didn’t have to. The foot lodged itself under his back and flung him over by the next magic circle. He didn’t need to hear or think to know what to do after that. He pushed himself up to his knees with his elbows and found the middle of the magic circle, sitting in it and then spreading his limbs across the floor just like he’d done many times a day for many days now. For many years now. Was the spider alive? No, he didn’t see it.

The magic circle glowed in that ill-omened color and everything came back. The loudness of examiners yelling names at all four sides of the room, of the little feet shuffling to their places in their cramped magic circles to see if today would be the day they died, if they’d be back in another one of these rotting rooms again tomorrow. The pain of his back and stomach, kicked around like a toy.

“Next,” the examiner said. Judar rolled on his stomach and pushed himself up onto his elbows. ‘Next’ didn’t mean that he was done and could go home. ‘Next’ meant that he was still alive so he should test the next magic circle, too. So he did.

Judar glanced to his next circle. The place he was supposed to be was already taken. It looked like the kid in front of him had died there. They’d eaten dinner together the other day, so that’s why Judar wasn’t surprised. Because the stupid kid had cried and whined about how she was gonna die here the whole time. Nobody who cried and whined like that ever lived past the end of the week.

Crying and begging to be saved was their facility’s death rattle. No reasonable kid would ever do that.

Judar pushed her body aside to the best of his ability and laid down in the circle. The instructor soon activated it. That color flashed and Judar’s head started to flash. He got a really, really bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

It felt different from all the other magic circles he’d been put through until now. It felt like it was meant to kill him. That the correct answer now would be to die or to otherwise give in. Let it possess him, let it kill him, that he should just give up now and never fight again.

It wasn’t _wrong._ He didn’t have a grand reason to be alive. Nobody here did. But last night he’d bragged that he was going to get so old that he’d be able to beat the guards up and escape, and he couldn’t be the laughingstock of dinner tonight because he up and died after talking big. So he tensed his muscles and gritted his teeth.

He couldn’t die before all the other shitty brats in this room kicked it. He couldn’t die before these shitty examiners got what was coming to them.

The spell ended as soon as it’d started. The examiner leaned down over him, bewildered.

“…You’re Judar, correct?”

“Yeah,” Judar choked out.

“Get up.”

That was a common command here, too. It meant ‘I think you purposefully rubbed at the magic circle and that’s the only reason you lived, because the death rate on this one’s above 50%.” So Judar rolled back on his stomach and lifted himself up again so the examiner could get a good look at the magic circle that’d just tried to kill him.

“…No smudges,” was all the examiner said before scribbling something else down in his notes. Judar could see them from where he was standing, but he couldn’t read them. There was no point in teaching lab rats how to read, after all. “Tomorrow you’ll be changed to a new room: 44. You’re dismissed.”

Judar didn’t respond. There was no need to respond. Every room was supposed to get harder, but really they were all pretty much the same. It was nothing as long as it didn’t kill him. 

Judar forced his wobbly legs over to the room’s single exit, a staircase so long he could never manage to count the steps. He leaned against the wall and started his slow ascent. This was the fourth and final test session of the day. Some days he did the same sets as the day before and some days he did different sets. Today was the same. Tomorrow would be different. But not by much. Nothing was ever that different.

He ate the same slimy millet as always for dinner and slept on the same hard floor as always at night. Someone kicked him in their sleep a few times. He kicked other people awake a few times. It was the same as always.

He awoke to the same color as always. Dawn.

It took him a minute or two to remember the number he’d been told to go to, but when he did, he forced himself up. The sooner he got it over with, the sooner he could have his dinner.

The knob to room 44 didn’t rattle like all the other knobs. The floor wasn’t rotting inside, either. And there weren’t any magic circles. Just some hag.

She smiled when she met his eyes. “Judar, was it?”

Judar didn’t say anything. He just waited.

“Today’s test will be a little bit different. I am going to try to kill you with magic. You are going to try to stop me. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.”

“If you are not successful you will die.”

“I’m not gonna die.”

“Heheh. You’re awfully confident. Then I’ll start now,” she said and drew an eight pointed star in the air between them.

Judar gritted his teeth and tensed his muscles just like he’d done yesterday.

He wasn’t going to die here.

He wasn’t going to die and let the other kids laugh over the funny face his corpse was making.

He didn’t have a reason to live, but he wasn’t going to die either. Just because he had to show this hag and all the other examiners in this facility that they were gonna get what was coming to them someday.

And then… his vision changed. Deepened.

It made sense. Her magic circle made absolute perfect sense. He understood how it was made, why it worked, and how to cast it. He’d never used magic before, but… he could see it right there. The angles, the signs, how to draw the world’s very life into his fingertips and use it to attack with.

His breath caught in his throat.

Power.

This was what power felt like.

For the first time in a long time, his lips curled up in a smile. He crouched down and rolled out of the way of the hag’s thunder, easily finding himself back on his feet. He lifted his hand and drew.

First the outer circle, then one square and then the next. The part that called for heat and the part that triggered the reaction. When he finished, he shot it right back at her.

“It’s exactly as Koumei reported,” the hag said. “It’s hard to see because your eyes are already that awful shade of red, but you are a special child. Heheh. You pass.”

“…Pass? But you didn’t even try to kill me. Keep going.”

Her smile widened past the boundary of what a smile should look like. “Are you asking to die?”

“No way.”

“Heheh. You’ll wish you had.”

Judar scowled.

\---

He’d never say that she was right. But she wasn’t wrong either.

As soon as Judar entered room 44, he was separated from the tedious life he’d grown accustomed to. He was separated from the children he’d grown to compete with and he’d never be sent back again.

Because as soon as he entered that room and locked eyes with her, his fate had been sealed.

That was the day he became a monster.

Apparently it’d really happened back in the lab with the greasy examiner the hag called Koumei. She said he saw a faint pentagram in his eyes when he leaned over him to check and see if he really survived and that was why he sent Judar to another room.

“You activated your Alpha Stigma and didn’t even notice it,” she said and cackled. “You monsters are dumber than dogs.”

He didn’t really know what to say to that.

She introduced herself soon after as Gyokuen. Judar recognized the name instantly.

She was part of the noble Ren family that ran this shitshow.

“I will raise you from now on,” she said. “But not as my son. You are not even fit to be my pet. I will raise you as a creature abandoned by God so that you may one day make yourself useful to Him.”

A pit settled in his stomach at those words. It didn’t go away. Not when he took his first ever bath, not when he lay in the first bed he’d ever been shown to, and not when he ate his first ‘fruit’. Delicious things, really. But they didn’t fix the pit in his stomach. Not even Gyokuen sharing her noble name with him fixed it.

He slept and it was there. He was experimented on and it was there. He was allowed to meet the real Ren children and it was there.

Kouen, Koumei, Kouha, Kougyoku. Some were examiners that he’d seen here and there. There were also some other girls he could never remember the name of. Hakuei. Some kid in a coma that he wasn’t supposed to meet but peeked in to see anyway out of curiosity. There was a whole passel of them and they never had to sleep on the bare floor with fifty dirty orphans. They all got their own beds and baths and maids to follow them around and clean up their messes.

They were basically the most spoiled brats Judar had ever seen in his life.

He wasn’t jealous at all. Nobody wanted to be that spoiled. Not even if it meant they got to take baths every day instead of just once a week and not even if it meant they got to wear _gold_ whenever they wanted to. Gold! If he had some gold, he was sure the pit in his stomach would be gone in no time.

But monsters didn’t get gold. They did get hot meals if they endured enough in a day, though.

Every day Gyokuen and her goons taught him more and more spells. It was really easy since all he had to do was look at them. He even made a few new ones from the information he got from looking. They said they’d use them in the basements to test them out.

The basements were where all the others lived. He used to think they were kids, but maybe they were just dogs. He didn’t really know anymore.

Just when he settled into his new life, he met another kid his age.

He was scrawny. Way too thin to have hair and eyes like Gyokuen. Though ‘eyes’ was a little misleading since he had one covered with a wet bandage. It was gross. Judar reached out to touch it.

The kid swatted his hand away. “What are you doing?” His voice was quiet and hoarse. “And… who are you?”

“A monster,” Judar said simply. “The kind you can find under your bed.”

“…What?”

Apparently this kid didn’t know what a joke was. Figured. “You know, like demons and stuff? What are you, stupid?”

“Are you trying to tell me that you’re a demon?” The kid asked. “You’re eight years old…”

“Whoa, how’d you know?”

The kid shrugged, but he was smiling just a little. So he did like to talk, did he? It wasn’t long before he realized that he was smiling, though, and when he did he forced a frown. “You didn’t tell me what your name is.”

“Judar. What about you?”

“Hakuryuu. But…”

“But…?”

“But I think… you’re one of _her_ experiments.”

“…Gyokuen?” Judar asked. The name made Hakuryuu flinch. Judar couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah. I guess so. But you know? I’m also a natural-born monster.” He opened his eyes wide. Doing so activated his Alpha Stigma. It shone from his deep red eyes.

He expected Hakuryuu to flinch. He expected Hakuryuu to say, ‘eww!’ like some of the Ren kids did - he had to be another one of them, after all, with how much he looked like Gyokuen all the way down to that mole - but he didn’t.

“You can… copy magic, right?” Hakuryuu asked.

“Yeah!” Judar said and drew a magic circle as an example. It was a complicated spell that he saw Gyokuen cast once. 

“Isn’t that dange—”

“Don’t sweat it!” Judar said. He finished his magic circle, then fired it at Hakuryuu. It swallowed him up in a second… then dropped him several feet away.

Hakuryuu reappeared with wide eyes. “You… learned this from Gyokuen?”

“No, I figured it out myself.” Judar puffed up his chest. “Cool, right?”

Hakuryuu didn’t say anything for a long while. Then he smiled politely. “As interesting as it is… I need to go. Please excuse me.”

“…Seriously? Man, what a drag…”

\---

Judar saw Hakuryuu a few times after that here and there. He tried to ignore him every single time. It didn’t matter if Judar was loud to get his attention or if he used magic to surprise him and show off how cool he was. Hakuryuu just didn’t care!

Well, he _did_ care a little. Sometimes he’d let his guard down and smile or laugh. That victory was so sweet that Judar kept doing it again to try to win again. But if that was a win, and getting ignored was a loss, the score was pretty bad right now. Hakuryuu probably had about twenty times as many wins as he did.

But he’d catch up!

Anyway, time passed. Lots of time.

Judar was old enough for Gyokuen to enlist in the army. So she did. Her family would get military awards and perks for training an orphan into something useful. That was why so many nobles did it.

There were lots of other kids like him in the military. Some were a lot better at using weapons than he was. But nobody really fought with weapons anymore, and nobody was as strong of a mage as he was. So Judar’s name quickly spread across the country. But it was never _just_ his name. It was Gyokuen’s, too. 

__That was about when Judar realized how serious the Alpha Stigma thing was._ _

__He’d joked about being a monster before. Everyone joked about him being a monster back then, so it felt like the right thing to do with them. But when he joked about it and mentioned it to some guys in the barracks…_ _

__“You’re… _what?_ ”_ _

__“Like I said, a monster.”_ _

__“But a… an Alpha Stigma bearer?”_ _

__It was a weird moment to remember. But Judar would probably never forget that guy’s face. He was plain and he’d never made an impact until then. But in that moment… in that moment, he was far more scared that Judar had ever seen someone. And he spent his days killing for Gyokuen’s honor._ _

__That fear was human. He was sure of that, as a monster._ _

__Everyone in the barracks turned on him that night. So he killed them all and used the spell he stole from Gyokuen to teleport home._ _

__Home… well, that was what he called it, but… Gyokuen would be mad if she knew what he just did. Well, she already hated him. In that way where she couldn’t keep her hands off, like with Kouen. But he wasn’t human like Kouen, he wasn’t made by her god like Kouen was, and… was that Hakuryuu?_ _

__“Judar,” he said, dumbfounded. “Why are you here?”_ _

__Judar looked around. Come to think of it… “Where _am_ I?”_ _

__“M-my room! Where else!?” Hakuryuu half-yelled. Then he huffed… and then noticed the blood dotting Judar’s skin here and there. “What happened?_ _

__“I got in a fight.”_ _

__“And came running home?”_ _

__“Uh, I won. For your information.”_ _

__Hakuryuu rolled his eyes. It was supposed to be annoying, but it ended up making Judar smile instead._ _

__For some reason, he was seeing that nobody’s scared face when he blinked. For some reason, he was still smelling the blood of the men he’d fought with for months now._ _

__“Anyway, I’m tired. Let me sleep here for the night,” Judar said._ _

__The half smile instantly vanished from Hakuryuu’s expression. “Judar. You’re covered in blood.”_ _

__“It’s not that much.”_ _

__“It’s enough that it reeks. I don’t know what you did. Why should I let you hide here?”_ _

__“…Hey, Hakuryuu. I have a question.”_ _

__“What?”_ _

__“Do you think I’m a real monster? Not the kind you find under beds, but like… you know? The kind people burn at the stake…”_ _

__Hakuryuu laughed._ _

__Judar usually thought it was a sweet sound. Especially as he got older. This time was a little different. It fell into his stomach and reopened the chronic pit of his youth. He was suddenly struck by the fact that Hakuryuu was different. Because he could laugh… and Judar would get that fluttery little feeling. It just happened more and more as he got older._ _

__Even now it was endearing… but it was affection he felt from the other side of a glass screen._ _

__So Hakuryuu knew all along, did he?_ _

__He knew that it wasn’t a joke. He knew that Judar was the real kind of monster._ _

__“Do you know why?” Hakuryuu asked._ _

__“…Uhh, I might… but I also might’ve forgotten, so…”_ _

__“It’s because you’re going to go berserk. One day, something will flip a switch in your brain, and you’ll never be the same again,” Hakuryuu said._ _

__“What’s that supposed to mean?”_ _

__“Someday, you’ll lose consciousness for the last time,” Hakuryuu said. “Maybe it’ll be like sleep. Or maybe you know that you’re killing everyone you’re supposed to love and just don’t care. I don’t know. I’m not cursed.”_ _

__“Cursed,” Judar repeated. “Yeah, that does sound kinda cursed.”_ _

__“It is. Can you blame people for wanting to kill you first? I mean, you’re a soldier for a noble. You’ve killed for less.”_ _

__“…Yeah. I have.”_ _

__Hakuryuu looked him over for a moment as if trying to decide his next move. Then he took a step closer. “So, monster. Tell me. Did you let your army find out.”_ _

__“Gyokuen said it was important that I didn’t tell anyone. So I told everyone,” Judar admitted._ _

__“How like you,” Hakuryuu said. He touched his hands to Judar’s shoulders._ _

__His breath hitched._ _

__“But that wasn’t the smartest move,” Hakuryuu finished and pushed Judar down. He fell to Hakuryuu’s mattress._ _

__“……”_ _

__It was soft. Really soft. And something about the impact, about the feeling of looking up at Hakuryuu like this, emptied his brain completely. It had to restart from square one._ _

__His body was reacting like it was a bad thing. His heart sped up like it had when everyone learned he was an Alpha Stigma bearer. It was pumping enough blood for him to cast as much magic as he needed through his veins. Would Hakuryuu attack too? He shouldn’t. He always knew what Judar was. He knew because Judar was a dumb kid who didn’t understand the gravity of his situation. But in this moment, he did. Should he attack first? Could he?_ _

__“You’re looking at me like a wild beast,” Hakuryuu said. “Calm your animal instincts. You’ve just done something extremely fortunate for me. People will figure out what you did sooner or later, no matter what it was. And when they do, it’ll ruin Gyokuen’s reputation.”_ _

__“…I knew that,” Judar said. He hadn’t actually thought about it yet. But he would have after a few more minutes. “You’ve hated her for a long time, haven’t you? Sometimes you try to hide it. But you usually don’t even bother…”_ _

__Hakuryuu nodded. It was quick and to the point. He was tense and it showed. “It looks like the same goes for you.”_ _

__“Yeah. But I’m better at hiding things like that.”_ _

__Hakuryuu didn’t argue. “From now on, I’d like you to work with me,” he said._ _

__“…Even though I’ll just go berserk?”_ _

__“It’s the only chance I’m going to get,” Hakuryuu said. He climbed on the bed. Over Judar. He pinned him if only to show that he could. “You won’t be able to go back to the battlefield either way. Gyokuen will try to kill you either way. Why leave a dying animal on the side of the road when it can just as easily be a full course meal?”_ _

__Judar gulped. He was… the animal then, right? But that was weird._ _

__Judar knew that he was less than Gyokuen’s pet. But he always thought Hakuryuu was different… oh, but it was the Gyokuen’s pet thing that was a problem with him, wasn’t it?_ _

__Couldn’t someone—_ _

__“It has to be you,” Hakuryuu said. “Nobody else can do it. You’re the only one who could get close enough to Gyokuen for this to work. You’re the only one who can fight on her level with magic. Your eyes can copy every spell you see. You’re her perfect enemy. That’s why she’s kept you so close for so long. Fight her with me, Judar. I can’t ask anyone else.”_ _

__“……”_ _

__Maybe it was because of his heart screaming through his ribs to throw Hakuryuu off before he pulled a knife out to carve his monster’s heart out of his chest. But he felt lightheaded suddenly._ _

__“Okay,” Judar said. “Yeah. You’re right. Let’s destroy her. Let’s destroy this facility. I’ll go berserk. And when I do, I’ll destroy the whole world.”_ _

__Hakuryuu smiled._ _

__It was a contract of sorts. A contract between a monster and a human. The terms were simple: they’d kill until something flipped Judar’s switch and made him go mad. Then everything they knew would cease to exist. Hakuryuu would die. Gyokuen would die, if she hadn’t already. And his whole world would end in freshly spilled scarlet._ _

__But it was something that only he could do. So he’d do it._ _

**Author's Note:**

> you ever wonder how much of another person's words are true and how much is just something they're saying so that they can use your skills for their own benefit? do they really care in the end? i think that judar isnt really the type to worry about those things, and i think he probably doesnt understand why his life feels different now that someone has said that they need him. but he might figure it out someday


End file.
